Tragedy Girls
Director: Tyler MacIntyre
Writer: Chris Lee Hill, Tyler MacIntyre, Justin Olson
Cast: Brianna Hildebrand, Alexandra Shipp, Jack Quaid, Kevin Durand, Timothy V. Murphy, Craig Robinson, Josh Hutcherson
Part of: Viennale
Seen on: 1.11.2017
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Plot:
Sadie (Brianna Hildebrand) and McKayla (Alexandra Shipp) are best friends and do pretty much everything together. Most notably, they run an online channel together where they discuss true crime cases with which they’re both fascinated. Trying to gain popularity for themselves and their show, they try to catch a serial killer in the area. But when they do catch up with him, a simple capture seems not enough anymore.

Tragedy Girls is a very entertaining film, even if it doesn’t revolutionize the “twist on the slasher-movie” counter-genre that is now its own genre. I had fun all the way through.

Ever since Scream, self-aware horror movies that play with the genre tropes have been a staple of horror movies in general. Tragedy Girls is one of those films and while the novelty of it may have worn off by now, it’s still a whole lot of fun to watch.

And what we do get here that’s still rare even in that subgenre is that Sadie and McKayla are allowed to stay friends until the end. It’s rare to see female friends represented and rarer still to have their relationship not be defined by a sense of competition between the two. So that was wonderful to see.

Hillebrand and Shipp play these two girls with relish and its at least as joyful to watch as their relationship is in general.There were also some nice familiar faces in the supporting cast, with a particular highlight being Josh Hutcherson whose short role in the film had me in tears from laughing so hard.

The gore was extremely nice and played very successfully for laughs, also showing the aware genre-winking that marks the entirety of the film and that makes it so incredibly entertaining.

Summarizing: Very enjoyable.